Brina’s Rube Goldberg Team Creation – Hit the Cup!

Last week I went to summer camp while my parents were at work. We went to a camp called CCES – Summer Encounters. In the morning I did a camp on Technology and Music. In the afternoon I did a class about Rube Goldberg. The Rube Goldberg camp was my favorite! It was a lot of fun building a lot of different creations to do fun little tasks. We worked in teams, used our creativity, and had a great time!

My first Rube Goldberg contraption was creating a system of devices that helps us get our ball from the start of the maze like creation to the end where it lands in the cup. The video is of our ball completing the tasks we designed it to do. The ball has to go through a bunch of different mazes and items we created for it and lands in a cup at the very end.

What is Rube Goldberg?

Rube Goldberg is known for his comics and for inventing complex machines to complete simple tasks. He has created various contraptions, inventions, devices, or apparatus by making it harder than necessary to perform a task. Through a series of chain reactions and devices you can make do something serious, fun, or silly.

There is an actual Rube GoldbergMachineContest where college and high school students build devices to complete a simple task. The students have to use at least 20 steps Every year teams from all over the world compete to create a Rube Goldberg Machine which is an overly complex contraption, designed with humor and a narrative, to accomplish a simple task. The machine typically involves a chain reaction of events to produce, the final simple step. In his honor, campers will enjoy the challenge to turn a simple task, like flipping a light switch on with the flick of a finger, into an incredible maze of steps of reactions to finally end with task completion, like the light switch being flipped on.

This week during our summer camp we choose to do our own Rube Goldberg creations. We are not competing in the big competition, but we had a lot of fun creating a variety of silly contraption. My group created the following items:

A Ball that goes through a series of mazes and lands in a cup

A Zipline

Turn the lights off in the room

I worked with a lot of different people throughout the week to create these inventions. It was fun being creative, silly, and finding interesting ways to make these items. There was a lot of creativeness, laughter, and fun going on in our classroom. My parents were excited to hear about the items we worked on throughout each day.